Hi, pseudonymous,
I lament that I am proud to be an atheist, but embarrassed to have no community to be a proud member of.
It may be that the reason you have no community is similar to the reason I no longer call myself an atheist: there is no community in a negative.
Atheism is the belief that there is no god, i.e., that it is not the case that there is a god. This proposition has two weaknesses:
- It does not declare what it is you do believe, and hence provides no basis for individual growth or communal support.
- It makes a general claim that apparently is intended to apply regardless of what is meant by the word "god". In other words you declares that whatever it is that the word means, you doesn't believe in it.
Much of what you say suggests that atheism is held most dear by those who were raised as
children of the book, i.e., in Jewish or Christian or Islamic families. I can't testify as to whether that's true. But it does raise the question whether one who has lost his faith in the deity of one faith cannot find it in another.
The problem is that there is no catalog of god-candidates out there to turn to when you find your initial purchase unsatisfactory. And they don't come unbundled. You can't buy one
ala carte. They all come packaged in dinners that have unappetizing elements. They have mythologies and religions attached. And while I might like that god, I might find the mythology incredible and the religion uncomfortably restrictive.
In my case my background in philosophy gave me some tools to back away from unrelenting atheism. You've probably studied the various arguments for (and against) God's existence (capitalization required here, since these arguments were about the God of a particular religion (or family of religions). One of them, the so-called
Cosmological Argument, argues that God is the first, uncaused cause of the universe. There are two standard responses to this argument:
- There might be an infinity of causes, each caused by a prior, without a first cause.
- Even if there is a first cause, there is no reason to believe it is still around.
Descartes offered an enriched form of this argument, intended to reply to the first of these responses. He said that if there is an infinity of causes, there must at least be a principle by which each of these causes leads to another. He suggested that there cannot be an infinite series of principles for causation, presumably because being a principle for is essentially a higher order of explanation.
Descartes laid down this enriched Cosmological argument rather quickly without much development. I got the impression that he felt the his other arguments had really sealed the matter, and that this particular reasoning was supplementary but superfluous.
When I first read this argument, I found it wholly unsatisfactory. Even if sound, the argument failed to prove that it was the God of the Old and New Testaments that was the principle of causation. The argument might have proved something, but not what was intended.
In later years however, I've found the Cartesian approach more intriguing. Can we find in it something worthy of the name "God"?
First we need to explicate what might be meant by the word "principle". What is it for a thing to be a principle for something. Taken in one direction, it can be understood as the laws of nature. This would turn God into a pure abstraction. Taken in another direction it becomes Tillich's
ground of being (whatever that is). I don't know about you, but I find such an abstruse abstractions completely unsatisfying as a god-concept. My god has to be a bit more personal and accessible.
An alternative approach is to adapt Descartes argument by defining God as the whole of which we are a part. Technically I guess this turns it into a
mereological argument (from
mereology, the study of parts and wholes). That is, God is the universe. But more than that, God is the whole system of the universe, of which you and I and everything else are subsystems.
What does this modification achieve? Perhaps the following:
- God is an individual being, not an abstraction.
- God, i.e., the universal system, is the cause of everything. It might even be that some of what happens is God's intentional actions. I've argued elsewhere (e.g., spiderbaby's solving consciousness thread) that conscious choice is whole system behavior that arises as animals evolve to respond to complex situations. God as the whole system doesn't evolve, but is the collection of evolving systems. That this process might lead to the consciousness of the whole system is at least conceivable.
- God is in a sense in a higher plane of existence, being to us as we are to the components of our bodies. One might speculate that the communications and information systems that now interconnect people and computers around the globe are analogous to the axons and dendrites that interconnect the neurons of our brains. This fact, along with the research of Lovelock and Margolis on the Gaia Hypothesis, suggest that it might be reasonable to think of the earth as a living, maybe even conscious being.
- God is all-powerful. Everything that can be done can be done by the universal system.
- It at least reasonable to think of one's obligations to God as one's obligations to the whole. Morality becomes not an arbitrary set of rules, but instead a very practical matter of making the whole work better.
This of course is just speculation that I find captivating. What I would ask you is why, even if you find the God of your youth as no longer credible, you conclude that there can be no other concept of God in this universe worth thinking of as both credible and divine?
Namiste.
